On Mar 17, 2013, at 04:58 , Randall Leeds <randall.leeds@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 6:27 PM, Nathan Stott <nrstott@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Just a CouchDB fan who has been using it since v0.8 here. I read this list
>> a lot and want to chime in on this topic. To be blunt, those who are
>> arguing to ignore pull requests or trying to keep Noah from taking his
>> suggested steps are being obtuse. The tone of this discussion and the
>> attitude towards pull requests from some contributors looks extremely bad.
>
> I don't see anyone arguing for ignoring them.
>
> On the other hand, I very much sympathize with Benoit in many ways.
>
> There are two alternatives that I like.
>
> 1) Don't allow pull requests. I mean don't *allow*. As in, there is
> literally no place to make one in the Github UI.
> 2) PR comments to go to dev@. Replies to that thread become PR comments somehow.
>
> If I get an email through dev@ about a PR I don't want to go to Github
> to reply, I want to respond to the email.
>
> Number 2 is the best, IMO. But without *two way* sync, the discussion
> doesn't feel smooth to me. In the absence of that, I would prefer no
> pull requests than one-directional pull request*, and say "contribute
> through these accepted methods". Unfortunately, I don't think the
> first option is *possible*. Therefore, we cannot stop people from
> making pull requests, and we can't ignore them, so one direction is
> better than no direction.
>
> If we can't turn off the ability to make a pull request at all, I
> think we go forward with comment sync and hopefully we get to full,
> two-way sync real soon.
>
> * I hate the idea that someone can make a PR and, in order to respond,
> one has to have a Github account. That feels like it violates the
> spirit of our vendor neutrality. People can always discuss things
> elsewhere (G+, Twitter, whatever), but to have an "official" channel
> like apache/couchdb on Github and not discourage contributions through
> that channel we should support it in both directions without pushing
> everyone to use Github.
I 100% sympathise with the sentiment here. It feels technically and
socially dirty to go with a one-way solution and I wish there was a
know we can turn that makes it all work.
Now, I think that handling PRs the way we do now is a *way worse
offense* to contributing to CouchDB than getting mails to dev@ back
to GitHub Pull Requests. Orders of magnitudes worse.
So much so that I volunteer to manually copy all the emails that
are sent in reply to a Pull Request to dev@ back to GitHub.
And yes, that sucks on a number of levels, but it gives us an 80%
solution that doesn’t hurt anyone (except me, but I volunteer) for
a problem that holds contributions to CouchDB back big time.
Furthermore, I think two-way sync can be solved technically and I
will have every incentive to make that work, my manual labour gets
out of hand (heh).
Finally, please stop bringing up vendor-neutralness. This is a non-
issue here. The second GitHub starts acting in a way we don’t like
it, we can drop everything. Again, this is an optimisation for sub-
group of developers that helps the project overall without making it
harder for anyone else using other means *and* it doesn’t put Apache
CouchDB into a vender-lock-in situation down the road.
Cheers
Jan
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